


wind comes up (and sometimes you think, you could do anything)

by leoperidot



Series: my fics for bakoda fleet week 2020 [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Coming Out, F/F, Gender Non-Conforming Character, Gender Roles, M/M, author is a yearning sapphic, bato is gay and yearning, bisexual kya, everyone is gay and yearning, gay bato, i love her to death okay!!!!, idk if the swt would Actually b homophobic but it uh. works here so, it's like a cross between hurt/comfort and hurt/no comfort, kya backstory, kya is sapphic bc i said so, like comfort is offered but it makes things worse, she is also yearning, the epigraph is a sappho quote obviously everyone is gay and yearning, wlw/mlm solidarity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:54:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25576141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoperidot/pseuds/leoperidot
Summary: Kya has fallen in love twice. Bato, only once.
Relationships: (not one-sided), (one-sided), Bato/Hakoda (Avatar), Hakoda/Kya (Avatar), Kya & Bato (Avatar), past Kya/OC
Series: my fics for bakoda fleet week 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1853833
Comments: 27
Kudos: 97
Collections: Bakoda Fleet Week 2020





	wind comes up (and sometimes you think, you could do anything)

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for bakoda fleet week 2020 day 2! prompt: young. they're kinda young in this but not kids, they're like 25. the bakoda is angsty.
> 
> title is slightly paraphrased from "any way the wind blows" from hadestown bc hadestown is the SHIT if u haven't listened to it what are you doing with yourself.
> 
> the name of the oc is Ticasuk, which behindthename.com (lol) tells me is an Inuit name meaning "where the four winds gather all their treasures from all parts of the world." keep the wind theme in mind bc i ran with it lmao

_Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless  
days we spent might be made twice as long._

_I prayed one word: I want._

_Someone, I tell you, will remember us,  
even in another time._

—Sappho 

“We should get back to the campfire,” said Bato absently. “They’re probably wondering where we are.” But he didn’t make any particularly purposeful movements to do so.

Kya leaned down to pick up one last stone. “This one looks like a star,” she cooed, holding it out to him in her palm. 

“You’re like a child,” he said, with a smile.

“Nothing childish about appreciating beauty,” she murmured, slipping the stone in her pocket with the couple others she’d gathered on their seaside walk.

“I think it’s endearing,” he countered.

A smile tugged at the edges of her lips.

Bato had not been her first choice, when she’d first made it to this village, and if she was honest with herself, he probably still wasn’t. But he was the more attainable, and she figured she could grow to love him—and now, here they were, strolling beside the ocean, alone, together, at night. 

So maybe she should just go for it.

She took his hands in hers. “You’re endearing,” she said, looking up at him.

He indulged her with a chuckle. “Why, thank you.”

She stepped closer—the space between them wasn’t even the width of a hand now. His eyes widened. Good sign or bad, she didn’t know, but she hoped she was doing the right thing as she fluttered her eyes and asked him, “Do you want—”

“Kya.” His hand on her shoulder stopped her advance cold. He looked down at her with a bemused smile. “I think you’ve misread the situation.”

“Oh?” She appraised him curiously. “Have I?”

“I think so.” His smile was sadder now. “I, uh . . .” He cleared his throat, looked down at their intertwined hands, ghosted his thumb over her knuckles as though to soften the blow. “The winds don’t blow that way. For me.”

The pieces fell into place.

Kya felt suddenly cold, as though a pack of ice had slipped into her shirt. She took one tiny step back. Nodded. “I see.”

Bato’s face, already uneasy, seemed suddenly closed-off. He removed his hands from her, stepped away, his motions almost mechanical. “Tui’s gills,” he muttered, burying his face in his hands and taking in a strangled breath. When he looked up, his face was set in harsh, thin lines. “Don’t tell anyone. Don’t—Not Hakoda.” A shakiness was slowly introduced to his voice. “Please. I—”

Alarm was rising in Kya. “Bato . . .” There was fear, unmistakable fear, in his eyes. A dagger went through her heart at the thought that she caused it. 

He kept shaking his head more desperately.

“Oh, Bato, no,” she started, finding that was all she could manage before her throat thickened with emotion and she couldn’t go on.

The fear in his eyes did not subside.

“I understand you,” she said timidly. “I . . .” She swallowed, cleared her throat, choked back her tears. “There was a woman,” she tried again. “When I was—when I was out in the east.” 

The eastern edge of the continent was rockier, harsher, even less densely peopled than the central tundra and northern and western coasts. The people there had a certain reputation as aloof, strange, antisocial. Perhaps Ticasuk had been all of these things, those two winters Kya had spent by her side. 

She had been older than Kya by a decade, her hair just barely beginning to grow in grey. She wore that hair almost like a man, eschewing the long braids worn by women for something approaching, but not quite replicating, a warrior’s wolftail. Ticasuk was handy with both a spear and a needle, like she straddled the barriers of the sexes, not quite confined to either side. A scar from a childhood fishing accident cleaved her left cheek, pale and raised; Kya had traced it so many times in the dark that her fingers still had the feeling memorized. What Kya remembered best, though, was Ticasuk’s soulful, melancholic, husky voice, tailored perfectly to the old songs and to conversations lit by campfire and warmed by closeness. 

“I was twenty,” Kya told Bato now, “and I was so scared to fall in love with her.”

The edge of a mournful smile twisted Bato’s lips. “Yeah,” he said heavily. “I get that.”

“It didn’t make sense to me then, but I think I understand it now.” She breathed deeply, feeling words come to her lips that she’d been trying to articulate for years. “I loved Ticasuk as easily as I could love Hakoda, because—Love, it shouldn’t be sequestered by the sexes. It’s only love.”

The proclamation hung in the air for a second, and a younger Kya, a less-certain Kya, might have tried to take back her words, but the Kya who said them knew so deeply they were true that she just stared Bato down, daring him to contradict her.

He didn’t. He just kept looking at her like she didn’t understand.

“The winds whip whichever way they want to,” Kya said, trying to defuse the tightening tension. Something had been lost in translation between the two of them, something important, something that had turned words she’d meant as comfort into something more sinister. “The winds are never wrong. You know that, right? They never lead us wrong.”

Bato heaved a deep sigh and didn’t answer. Another moment passed before he finally spoke: “So they’re right about the eastern shore.” An unsettled discomfort lingered in his voice. “Corrupted and traditionless.”

“Not totally,” she replied, her face as stoic as she could make it. This was not a part of the story she liked to remember, much less divulge, but—“There was a reason I had to leave.”

A moment of silence, a mutual understanding. Bato reached out and put his hand on hers. She squeezed his back. It was a kindness that didn’t clear the air.

“Anyway,” she continued, still holding his hand, “it didn’t feel traditionless. It felt right. Good. It felt like . . . it felt like the most natural thing in the world.”

There was an unplaceable emotion on Bato’s face. It might have been longing.

“I think that calling that love traditionless—I think it misunderstands tradition. Ticasuk and I, and you, we aren’t the first, we aren’t the last.” 

This thought was years old, having sprung to her mind once as she traced over Ticasuk’s scar in the dark, Ticasuk’s gentle, calloused fingers tangled in her hair, their faces so close each breath tickled the other’s cheek. The conviction had struck Kya out of nowhere but she had instantly known it to be true.

“We aren’t the only ones,” she’d whispered, so quietly and tenderly it was barely more than breath.

“Of course we aren’t,” Ticasuk had replied, the same.

“The ancestors felt like this.” Her words were holy; they were a prayer, to the moon and the sea and to all the ancestral women who’d loved each other, to any spirits that would listen. “And our descendants will someday, too.”

Ticasuk had kissed her then, soft and slow and momentous. That was tradition.

Now, Kya felt a wondrous conviction rising in her heart as she looked at Bato, as she held his hand. “We aren’t corrupt,” she told him, “or traditionless, or wrong. Not at all. We’re as connected to the ancestors as anyone else. And we deserve happiness, too.”

He nodded tentatively but didn’t look like he believed it.

Kya decided she might as well keep pushing. “Are you in love with Hakoda?”

Bato winced. He did not deny it. 

The question hung in the air awhile. Bato avoided her eyes. The two of them were still holding hands.

“You are, too,” he said, finally.

“Maybe.”

Bato chuckled. “No, you are. I notice things too, Ky.” He sighed. “You love him, but you think you can’t have him because he’ll be chief someday and you’re nothing but an itinerant seamstress and laundress, the daughter of inland tundra nobodies.” He rattled this all off impassively, speaking not to Kya but the rocky shore beneath their feet. “So you went after me. Because I’m the next-best thing.” He finally made eye contact, and his eyes were sharp with accusation. “I have that right, right?”

Kya was speechless for a moment. 

What hurt the most was that he was right. That was the exact calculation she’d made. It had seemed so rational in her head, but it was nothing but callous. 

“He’s yours,” Bato conceded, dropping her hand. “He wouldn’t take any other woman, anyway. You should see his eyes when he thinks you aren’t looking. You think he looks at Sima that way? Aguta?”

“Bato . . .”

“No,” he said sharply. “No, it’s fine, you can have him. _Take_ him. I don’t care.”

The unspoken subtext was that for a future chief’s match, even an itinerant seamstress and laundress, daughter of inland tundra nobodies, was far superior to a man.

Bato ran a hand over his hair, looking more agitated by the second. “No, you can have your happiness. You’ll get your lovely life with him, and you’ll be happy. Good,” he said. “ _Good._ ”

“That isn’t . . .”

“You don’t understand.” His voice was harsh, caustic, bitter. “You _could_ leave Ticasuk behind and fall in love with Hakoda. You may have loved a woman once, but now you love a man. The wind blows anywhere for you. You’re free.” He took a ragged breath. “I will _never_ love a woman the way I love him.”

“Oh, Bato—” She moved closer, tried to place a comforting hand on his shoulder, but he stepped back, dodging the touch.

“He’s yours,” he repeated steadfastly. “He will love you, and you’ll love him. You’re good for him. You’ll be happy, the two of you, and I’ll be happy for you. Someday. I will.”

She hated how her heart gave a little jump at the prospect of happiness with Hakoda. Even more, she hated that Bato was right. Because he was. He was right, and there was nothing she could do about it.

“You deserve happiness, too.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, with a strange, heart-rending calm. “It doesn’t matter, because I can’t have it. You can. Take it.”

He walked away. Back to their village. Calmly. 

The ocean lapped the shore obliviously.

Kya wanted to scream.

She didn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> bro i meant for this fic to be distinguished bisexual kya and functional gay bato commiserating over their mutual love for disaster bisexual hakoda how did it turn out like THIS
> 
> apparently bakoda week is just an outlet for me to express my thoughts about queerness now i guess
> 
> my tumblr is @katarahairloopies :)


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